


Changing the Minds of Pretenders

by praxibetelix



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Romance, Team Bonding, Team as Family, how many of my own problems can i project onto space aliens: the fanfic, or awkward guardians style comfort anyway, while you were using guns gamora studied the blade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-17
Updated: 2017-03-17
Packaged: 2018-10-06 09:50:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10331948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/praxibetelix/pseuds/praxibetelix
Summary: Five things the Guardians learned from each other.





	

i.

  
Drax isn’t stupid, and he’s picking up on patterns in the way his friends communicate. His people did not conquer six planets by being figurative, but here on the Milano a raised eyebrow, smile, or specific tone of voice can indicate that the speaker means the direct opposite of what they say, a source of anything from playful humor to a biting insult. Once Drax begins to understand this, it makes more sense why Quill and Gamora tell each other “I hate you” when their shared bed quarters and frequently intertwined hands make it clear this is not the case, or why Rocket flew into a rage when a client said he looked like the fiercest warrior in the galaxy.

  
Nobody, though, says the converse of what they mean more than Rocket himself. Anyone he’s contemptuous of is “pal”, anyone he’s fond of is “idiot”. Telling Drax to go ahead and leave more of his dirty laundry lying around the ship was actually an expression of annoyance at him doing so in the first place, and he had no real desire for all the Guardians to just move into a landfill if it mattered so little to them. (Why Quill said it was ironic that Rocket didn’t want to live in garbage remained a mystery, though. Something that was only funny on Terra, apparently.) The bad-tempered little beast becomes less confusing when Drax takes into account that at any time, he could mean the direct opposite of what he says.

One day at dinner, Quill is talking with his mouth full as usual: “Sffm fmmm creepy squid-faced bastard wants us to meet him in a cave, alone, with no weapons, so he can tell us more details about the job. We all agree this is a trap, correct?”

  
“Not necessarily,” says Drax. “Perhaps he wishes to surprise us with late solstice gifts.”

  
Rocket chokes on his roasted Moraggian sea dragon, and Gamora thumps him on the back. Quill is laughing, and reaches a flat vertical palm across the table – seemingly a Terran signal of pride in a comrade. “Drax, man, you did it! Sarcasm!”

  
“We’ve created a monster,” says Gamora, smiling.

  
Drax takes Quill’s extended hand in a firm handshake. “You are all worthless imbeciles, and have contributed nothing to my life,” he says fondly.

 

ii.

  
“I, don’t wanna know your name, cause you don’t look the same, the way you did before,” sings Drax under his breath, adjusting the heat on the stove under a pot of Xandarian-grown vegetables. Gamora is stirring her own pot of sauce, having been roped into helping cook dinner. She’s always thought it was odd how content such a gleefully bloodthirsty fighter was with domestic chores. “Are you doing well with the sauce, Kamaria?” Drax says, lost in thought.

  
“Kamaria?” Instantly she regrets it. He does too. The atmosphere in the room changes instantly, the two warriors sharing an awkward, painful silence.

  
“I apologize, Gamora. Kamaria was … my daughter’s name,” he says, looking at the floor. Gamora has already guessed. She would do anything to have let Drax’s mistake go unnoticed.

  
“In her last year, I was teaching her how to cook,” he says, his words continuing to spill out. Evidently it’s time to share feelings now, a regrettable fate that Gamora has witnessed befall everyone else on the Milano before. “She was barely an adolescent, but nearly as strong as her mother already, in muscle and spirit. Two remarkable women. Both burned every dish they made. When Ronan took them from me, I thought I would not shed tears of sorrow or joy again.”

  
Gamora nods, understanding more than she’d like. As embarrassed as Peter is about his wet eyes when he thinks too much about Earth, or Rocket about his pollen allergies acting up when the new, tiny Groot climbed out of his pot for the first time, she envies them their release in an awful, selfish way. Sometimes she thinks she cried out all the water in her body as a kidnapped young girl, leaving her with only a perpetual lump of guilt in her throat. “I’m sorry, Drax,” she says finally. “Your wife and daughter deserved better. I’m sure they would be proud if they could see you now.” She’s certain there’s some better thing to say in this situation, and wishes Peter was here to comfort their friend instead of her.

  
“One day I will reunite with them, and we will fight as a family on the endless battlefields.” he says. “But in the meantime, there are others I must teach to cook simple dishes without scorching them black.”

  
Gamora cracks a smile. “I did that _once_ , Drax.”

  
“Twice. I will say you have been infinitely more successful than Rocket.”

  
“Did he light the – “

  
“Stove on fire. Yes.”

 

iii.

 

Peter is slammed to the floor, his opponent’s boot planted painfully in his chest, her sword pointed at his throat. He jabs his own blade upward, but –

  
“Too late,” says Gamora. “A real enemy wouldn’t have hesitated to slice your trachea. Let’s try again.” She steps away and helps him to his feet, adjusting her grip on her wooden sword. A colored stripe indicates which side would be the deadly sharp one on a real weapon, but being hit with the practice one is unpleasant enough already. Peter’s landed a few hits on Gamora, but it’s clear he wouldn’t last long in a real fight against a trained swordsperson like her.

  
“You’re used to fighting with blasters and blunt Ravager weapons, so what you need to concentrate on is the motion of the end of your blade. You need to not only hit me with the sharp edge, but be in a position to use enough force to damage my vital organs.” She must have noticed some change in Peter’s expression at the idea of causing her fatal injury, because she smiles, the outlines of metal bits shifting under her green skin. “I hope recent events are not causing you to go easy on me, Quill.”  


“No. Course not.” Gamora _is_ different from any of the beautiful alien men and women who have shared Peter’s bed in the past, but not because she could kill him with her hands tied behind her back. That’s kind of his type, honestly. She’s different because she cares enough to make sure nobody _does_ kill him. And as pathetically sappy as it sounds, he can’t bring himself to think about anything happening to her.

  
Gamora attacks him again, and he successfully deflects her hit. They spar back and forth in a sort of concentrated dance, until Peter achieves a quick pivot that makes her lose her footing, and sticks the point of his sword under her chin. Her expression is one of surprise and pride. “Very good!” she says. “I’d be dead now. Your control has improved greatly.”

  
“Awesome. I’m just gonna sit down for a minute, because if I don’t I’m gonna pass out.” Peter lowers himself to the dusty cargo hold floor, then flops over flat on his back, exhausted. “You were great, babe. Course, you probably don’t swordfight such complete screw-ups most of the time.”

  
His tone is light, he doesn’t mean anything by it, but Gamora frowns. “You aren’t a complete screw-up, Quill.”

  
“Okay, but I’m like, seventy-five percent of one.”

  
To his surprise, she lies down on the floor beside him. “Forty percent.”

  
“I’ll settle for fifty.”

  
“It’s a deal.” Gamora props herself up on her elbow and leans over to kiss him.

 

iv.

  
Groot is lying under his sun lamp, watching the tiny, crudely welded metal leaves in the ceiling mobile cast lazy spinning shadows on the walls, when he hears the door open. He twists his trunk around to see Quill, grinning and waving somewhat patronizingly at him and clutching his usual small rectangular music device. “Hey there, Groot. Seems like your growing is coming along. Listen, I have an idea.”

  
Groot leans in curiously. “I am Groot?”

  
“I heard – and my gardening knowledge isn’t great, but I did hear – that playing music helps plants to grow faster. Would you be interested … in listening to some of my Earth jams?” He holds out the rectangle in an overly dramatic flourish. Groot has learned that a “plant” is what he is – made of wood instead of flesh like the rest of the crew, not capable of making as many sounds as them, but able to regenerate from injuries much faster. His caretakers are big, noisy, rude, violent, and often yelling at each other in harsh voices, but around Groot their meaty faces become soft and for some reason a little guilty. He wonders what happened before he was planted to make them this way.

  
He shrugs. “I am Groot.”

  
“This is gonna blow your tiny tree mind, little man.” Quill pushes the music device into a slot on the wall and hits a button, and a soft noise like strings being plucked fills the room, followed by a kind of melodic speaking by an unseen voice: “ _In a little café just the other side of the border, she was just sitting there givin’ me looks that made my mouth water._ ”

  
Quill sways his hips from side to side, arms slowly rising above his head, mouthing the words with exaggerated expressions. “You gotta listen to the rhythm, Groot. Really get into it."

 

 _"And I knew, yes I knew, I should leave when I heard her say, come a little bit closer, you’re my kind of man._ ”

  
By the second chorus, Groot is dancing too.

 

v.

  
“I am Groot,” says the little tree as he runs ahead of Rocket, leaping across the lava rivulets in the ground.

  
“Yes, it is. If you fall in, don’t come cryin’ to me, alright?” Rocket’s been more nervous than he’d admit to anyone about letting Groot come along on this precious volcanic rocks job. Groot’s always been kind of a naïve, trusting moron, but in the past he was big and creepy-looking enough to take care of himself. Now his outside matches his inside, and suddenly everything seems like it could hurt him. Honestly, Rocket isn’t sure how much of his old buddy is still in there, and he doesn’t want to be weird about things. And you have to admit, it’s useful to have an extra pair of hands from a team member small enough to run across the thin strips of rock amid the lava.

  
As they reach the end of the lava flows, Rocket picks up the last few volcanic rocks he can fit into his already heavy backpack, motivating himself by thinking of the equally heavy load of units the Guardians can soon take off their obnoxiously rich client’s hands. The shining curve of the Milano comes into view at the bottom of the hill, and Rocket breathes a sigh of relief that they’ve completed their mission without Groot becoming a burned twig. Actually, he seems pretty happy hopping from boulder to boulder down the hill. Rocket could probably catch up with him if his idiot lab- grown brain didn’t keep making him check that the stones were still in his bag.

  
“I am –“

  
Groot disappears between two rocks, and Rocket swears he can hear the crunch from where he is. In a sudden panic, he drops the bag and races on all fours down to the crevice where the tiny sprout fell. “Groot!”

  
Groot isn’t too far down, but he clearly didn’t have time to brace for the fall, and his shoulder and arm have been crushed into splinters. His little wooden face is twisted with pain. “I am Groot,” he cries out as he tries to move.

  
Rocket’s heart drops. In the old days Groot would have grown back from this within minutes, but now? He has no idea how well his regenerative abilities work at this age. Or what infections from this planet’s pathogens he might now be vulnerable to. “Don’t- don’t get up. Just stay there, buddy. I’ll get help, alright?” He grabs a fistful of his own shoulder fur, yanking it hard enough to distract him from his ridiculous internal hysterics. For a second, he’s clearheaded enough to punch out the Milano’s code on his communicator. Groot sobbing with pain in his new, diminutive form is an image he really, really wants to block out.

  
“Quill, get over here now.” His breathing is shallow and he isn’t sure he’s forming words right.

  
“Got it.” Seconds, maybe minutes, go by as the Milano fires up its engines. At a painfully slow pace, the ship finally heaves itself off the ground.

  
“I am Groot!”

  
Rocket spins around to see the little tree climbing laboriously out of the crevice, face still scrunched with discomfort, but his torso healing and his damaged arm regrown to about half the size of the other one. Even as Rocket watches in disbelief, his friend’s small twig fingers inch gradually outward, until the arm is nearing its usual length.

  
“I am Groot,” he explains.

  
“It works _faster_?” Rocket says incredulously, mostly so his voice doesn’t crack with relief. “And you didn’t think to tell me this? At any point? What, so you could hang out in the frickin’ ship all day _regrowing_ instead of bein’ useful?”

  
The shadow of the Milano falls over them, and Quill’s voice crackles on the communicator, low and urgent with worry. “Rocket, how’s Groot doing?”

  
“Uh, he’s fine, Quill. Still a miniature douchebag, but what else is new.”

  
“I thought that was you, Rocket.”

  
“Ha, ha.”

  
The deal goes off without a hitch, but as occasionally happens for no reason at all, that night is one of the nights where somebody can’t sleep. Lately, these nights tend to end up with everyone sitting at the kitchen table, getting drunk and weepy about bad past stuff. This time it’s Gamora, bitterly recounting the atrocities she committed as Thanos’ daughter, admitting she doesn’t think any amount of civilians she saves now can make it right. The other Guardians aren’t, y’know, therapists or anything, but hug-based comfort is near universal in the galaxy, and they end up sleeping in a pile on the floor, Quill snuggled at Gamora’s side like a scruffy Terran blanket, Drax holding her free hand, Groot and Rocket by her feet.

  
Rocket is the last one awake, and in between Drax’s snores he can hear his and Gamora’s machinery whirring softly along with the ship’s engine. Groot is sprawled asleep over her boot, scarring still visible around his shoulder but his arm regenerated back to roughly full size. For the first time in a long time, Rocket thinks regrowth might be possible.


End file.
